Inside A.C.T.

Theater is an art form where everyone in the room plays a part. Watch the video and learn why people who work and study at A.C.T. love the art of theater and the way it affects the world around us. We want to hear your story too. Check out our website to tell your A.C.T. story. All gifts made before June 30 help us meet our $100,000 Complete the Story Challenge and will be matched dollar for dollar. How will you contribute to A.C.T.'s next chapter?

Theater is an art form where everyone in the room, especially the audience, plays a part. Albert Rubio, a third-year student in A.C.T.'s Master of Fine Arts Program, tells his story. We want to hear your story too. Check out our website to tell your A.C.T. story. All gifts made before June 30 help us meet our $100,000 Complete the Story Challenge and will be matched dollar for dollar. How will you contribute to A.C.T.'s next chapter?

By A.C.T. Stage Coach Fellow Ariella Wolfe Police brutality. Gentrification. Marginalization. For some, these are political buzzwords, but for many residents of the Bayview-Hunters Point neighborhood, they are a daily reality. The play Crack. Rumble. Fly: The Bayview Stories Project , by Aleshea Harris, premieres this month on A.C.T.’s mobile stage unit in Mendell Plaza and gives voice to these struggles as well as the beauty, joy, and pride of this community. Two years ago, A.C.T.’s Stage Coach began building relationships with community members in Bayview-Hunters Point and commissioned Harris to write a script based on their stories and inspired by a classic Greek play. The thoughts, dreams, and questions shared by community members during A.C.T.-coordinated story circle workshops ultimately informed Harris’s creative decision to adapt Sophocles’s Oedipus the King . The cast of Crack. Rumble. Fly. is made up of professional and community actors from Bayview-Hunters Point and the ...

Theater is an art form where everyone in the room, especially the audience, plays a part. Arnie Glassberg, a board member of A.C.T.'s Master of Fine Arts Program, tells his story. We want to hear your story too. Check out our website to tell your A.C.T. story . All gifts made before June 30 help us meet our $100,000 Complete the Story Challenge and will be matched dollar for dollar. How will you contribute to A.C.T.'s next chapter?

By Shannon Stockwell The longer you work in theater, the more you gather tales of dramatic disasters, and the more you realize the resilience of theater makers who rally under the old adage: “The Show Must Go On.” Some problems can be anticipated, however, and that’s where understudies come in. For A.C.T.’s production of The Last Five Years , a two-person musical by Jason Robert Brown, we had two amazing understudies, but no one expected them to have to go on because the run was so short—only three weeks long. But illness struck, and both understudies ended up having to perform at different times. And, if you were at the performance on Saturday, May 28, you would have gotten to witness a special moment in theatrical problem solving when Margo Seibert, who was recovering from illness, was struck by a coughing fit in her first song and an unscheduled fifteen-minute intermission was called while her understudy, Kelsey Venter, prepared to go onstage as Cathy. To get the scoop on the ...

By Shannon Stockwell Composer Jason Robert Brown. Photo by Maia Rosenfeld. After writing the music and lyrics for Parade , a musical about the 1913 trial of Jewish factory manager Leo Frank, Jason Robert Brown was burnt out. “I had been working on [it] for five years and [it] ran for three months,” Brown says. “It was too exhausting and too hard and the therapy cost more than the royalties.” His first instinct was to get out of show business, but as he was planning where to go, Lincoln Center Theater (LCT) called him and said they wanted to commission a piece. He began to explain an idea he had been working on: an intimate song cycle about the relationship between a man and a woman (the polar opposite of Parade ’s 30-odd cast members). And as Brown was explaining, he came up with the idea of the two timelines crossing and meeting in the middle. LCT approved his idea. But Brown found that he couldn’t create something that belonged only on a concert stage, like Songs for a N...